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Alice in Thunderland
Date: Days of Thunder
Weather: The clouds begin the thunder and crickets murmuring
Actors usually create characters by observing other people around them. They observe, deconstruct and recreate. That’s the art of character creation. However, when you are working in a place that is saturated with middle to post-middle aged women who thrive on pettiness in life, that won’t give you much advantage in your art.
I need to correct that statement cos I did get that gay bitch job by observing the cat fights of these women. But then if that’s all I got from them, either I will become a gay bitch myself or I’ll just be stereotyping myself further in the industry.
Alice the Thunderland has been parading her success over Eva Cologne in the project but that hasn’t made work easy for Claire and I. Despite the fact that she actually is not our supervisor, she has been showing up a lot without reasons but just to try to tell us her importance in the whole matter. Sometimes I did wonder whether she got any real work to do. Surely she has been telling people how busy she is all the time, from her own office to her ex-co-workers in the library, but then if she is so busy why would she have time to go around telling people about that? That is a paradox that Claire and I could never figure out. Another thing that puzzled us is that why does she always carry a sour puss face with her? Surely after her triumph on Eva, she would have something to smile on as they were life enemies. But then even when she smiles, it just looks like an upward crack on her sour puss face and every time she laughs her squeaky voice just makes things worse.
So you may wonder if she has such a squeaky voice why is she known as Alice the Thunderland? That is because of her temper. She is well known for her temper whenever things didn’t go her way. And at this point you have to know that her way is not always the best. But probably because this job is basically her life, she just wants everything her way to live an easy life. As far as I heard, she is never married, never had a man in her life and also no family. Her only family member is a sister who is doing much better than she is with a happy family and two gorgeous teenage kids. We’d met her once at a function she and Alice are like heaven and hell. Claire and I could never figure out how come they could be so different. Anyway I digress. Claire and I had witnessed her temper in several occasions such as meeting times didn’t suit her personal schedule. With her, she can cancel your meeting anytime she wants but you still have to organise things around her schedules. Failure to do so, you warrant an angry email from her condemning you to eternity of your incompetence. I feel lucky that I am not the person organising them but did feel for Sonia’s PA.
You may further wonder how she got where she is now if she is that bad with people. Well she might not be good with men or other staff, but she does have a superior skill at her disposal – brown nosing. In the last few years, she has been sucking up to people superior to her and presented herself as a capable person by organising trips for bosses including Sonia and the library director. She will go to the distance of beating information out of their PA’s to find when they are going on trips and “accidentally” book a trip that will run into them overseas or interstate and conveniently join them because of the coincidence. I don’t know how much the bosses like her but the fact is that she has been getting what she wants inside and outside of the library because of this superior skill. Maybe as an actor, I really do need to learn this skill to go further, but then do I want to go that low? The other day after another catastrophic meeting, Claire told me she finally knew why Alice always carries a sour puss face – because she brown nosed so much that every time she inhales she can only smell shit and thus the sour pussing.
On the home front, my sister has finally come out of her hiding. She finally faced the fact that she can’t sing. She has been pretty quiet these days probably still trying get over the mockery she got at the audition. But the good thing is that everyone in the house finally got the peace required. She also stopped pestering me with stupid ideas about her singing and dancing and let me get on with life. Hopefully she will find something she is good at and work on it. Mum is definitely happy that she gave up singing and back to her uni studies as she always prefers a “normal” career for her kids than anything arty farty.
As for me, Hugo has been working hard to sell me and I did get one or two odd jobs here and there but nothing substantial to keep my payroll coming. So it seems that I will still be doing this shithole library job for a while to keep my mum happy. Well at least I got my meals and laundry done when she is happy, so all is not lost.
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